Nichts Neues
by seven dials
Summary: Vignette. A (naturally, not exactly complimentary) look at the subject of Youji from the perspective of the rather 'interesting' Neu. One-shot: completed.


**Nichts Neues**   
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila 

Standard Copyright Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz, it's characters, indices, etcetera remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss, Movic, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. I am a poor fangirl with a killer overdraft and am writing this because 1. it's fun, 2. I have some free time on my hands and 3. I really like Weiss Kreuz. 

Author's Notes: I don't know where this came from. I was trying to work on 'Seuche' and this idea assaulted me. Just for the record: I like Youji. I'm very fond of Youji, actually, even if I am primarily a Ken fan. Consequently this little vignette, written from Neu's perspective, does not even begin to reflect my own feelings for him. Neu fascinates me - she's by far the coolest member of Schreient - and I got the idea to write a quick piece about her and decided to give it a go. Now Neu, unfortunately, doesn't like Youji so I'm going to have to ream into him something awful. Forgive me, okay? 

I know who I am. 

He doesn't believe it, he doesn't want to believe it, but I know who I am and it is not the woman he likes to think of me as. 

I am not Asuka. My name is Neu. 

I am not a victim. I have not been hypnotized or drugged or forced into becoming Masafumi Takatori's bodyguard. I am not a lost and frightened little girl waiting for someone to find her, to take her home and kiss everything better. I am not a dupe, a target, a fool. I am not that kind of woman. I know who I am and I know what I am doing and I am doing it because I want to, not because I have no choice in the matter. I chose this path of my own volition; I do not stumble uncertainly down it with a gun, metaphorically, always at my back. And yet he - he can't see it. He can't see that I'm not the woman he wants me to be. Correction: he won't let himself see it. It would be almost sad if it wasn't so disgusting. 

Well, I suppose love is blind. Ha, but that doesn't go far enough if we're talking about Lover Boy over there. Lover Boy's not just been blinded by passion, it's made him deaf and stupid with it. They say that when one loves one becomes a fool and looking at him I can well believe it. He's ample proof of the truth behind the cliché. 

The Gods spare me from his kind of love! 

I do not love him. I do not love the tall, sleepy blonde with the slick, expensive clothes who smells of cigarettes and cologne. I do not love the young man who currently hangs all over me and buzzes around me all the while calling me by a different name. A name that is not my own and never could be even if I wanted it to. Which I double damn sure don't. Love _him_? Absurd! Why, I don't even like the guy. There's something fundamentally nauseating about him; his insistence that I'm someone I'm not is stomach-turning. He knows that I'm Neu! _Why_ persist in calling me Asuka? He's all Asuka this, Asuka that, Asuka the other… my Gods, it's maddening! Every time he calls me _Asuka_ I've got to fight the impulse to punch him! 

I tell myself that by doing this I will help my sisters under the skin, that Hell, Schoen and little Tot will benefit from my playing this part. This is for the good of Schreient. For the good of Masafumi-sama. 

Masafumi-sama is the only thing that could compel me to do something as distasteful as step into a dead woman's shoes and pretend for all my heart that I am her, simply because I hope in so doing to catch her besotted ex-boyfriend off his guard. If it wasn't for Masafumi-sama's sake I wouldn't have dreamed of ever trying to do something so ridiculous. 

I wouldn't have dreamed of playing at being this Asuka when I am Neu of Schreient. 

He knows it as well as anyone does. He knows full well that I've tried to kill him on more than one occasion - and yet he will not allow himself to believe that I might not have been coerced into it but that I really wanted to kill him, that I might be, shockingly enough, no more than I appear. That I might really, truthfully be his mortal enemy. It's convenient, in a way. I want no more from this man than his death at my own hands and he's not even making it difficult for me to accomplish it. 

But he… he has spotted something else in me. _Someone_ else in me. It's sickening to have to watch. It's sickening to listen to him talk to me and know that he isn't talking to me, that he would never talk to me, the woman that I know myself to be, in the ridiculous way he is. Because he isn't talking to Neu. As far as he's concerned I don't even exist. 

As far as he is concerned I'm someone else. 

I'm _Neu_, you bastard. Stop calling me by that ridiculous name--   
--but I suppose it's apt. He is ridiculous. 

Certainly he's not a patch on Masafumi-sama. Masafumi Takatori, my former boss and the man I have come to love - determined, ambitious, devastatingly intelligent, ruthless when needs be. It's not hard to admire Masafumi-sama. We four, we of Schreient, all adore him in our own different ways. We are all indebted to him for our own various reasons. He is an admirable man. He is a man, I admit, whom I find it easy to love. For whom I would sacrifice anything. For whose sake I currently play the part of a dead woman. 

He is nothing like the young dilettante whose company circumstances have forced to keep. I'd own some women may find him handsome but he is arrogant. He's too used to sexual success and it's turned him into the kind of man who won't take no for an answer, who expects any and every women to fall in his lap. Who can't even begin to fathom that maybe some girls, for reasons of their own, aren't receptive to his dubious charms. Certainly _I_ couldn't care less for him - why would I, considering I've known a man like Masafumi-sama? But I pretend. Hell, why not? If Lover Boy is willing to let his heart rule his head to that extent then why not make the most of it? 

Talk about only seeing what you want to, though. He wants to believe that I am his Asuka and all I have to do is play along with it. Tell him what he wants to hear. Follow him meekly around, like a stray dog - no, a stray cat - and pretend to be oh so impressed by everything he is showing me. Oh I think something's coming back to me. This is familiar, that's familiar, maybe I've been here before. Nod and smile in all the right places. It's too simple! 

I never knew I was such a good actress--   
--but I wouldn't even call it acting. 

It's not even right to say that I'm playing the sharp little actress. What I'm doing isn't acting and it doesn't deserve to be dignified by that title. There's no talent to what I am doing; it's not a drama, not even a TV soap. I'm compounding a simple deception and that's the end of it. Part and parcel of being a woman, that - pretending an interest in some self-obsessed young man's strange little fantasy world… 

For now, anyway. For as long as it takes him to lower his guard completely. 

The saddest thing about this all - or rather what would be the saddest thing, if it weren't so hilariously absurd - is that I have done this before! I have let him believe I am someone I am not before now, simply to allow myself to get close to him. I have managed to gain his trust only because it makes the subsequent betrayal all the more painful. 

Doesn't he remember the day he met Kyoko? I'm almost pained. I thought that was the start of something special. Don't mind my laughing in your face, Weiss. 

Doesn't he remember that day? The day he left that pretty little, silly little blonde girl he was walking with to chase _me_, to chase his enemy… to hunt down _Neu_? Doesn't he remember Kyoko? Kyoko, who let him take her out, wine and dine her, to sweep her off her feet and who, when his guard was down, tried to kill him? Kyoko, who never even existed because Kyoko was me. I would have killed him then had we not been interrupted, had he not got lucky. To be deceived once is unfortunate but to be deceived in the same way twice and by the same woman on both occasions, no less, is nothing short of bizarre. 

Well, mine not to reason why. If he's too blind to see it why should I show him the light? The time for that is not yet ripe. 

I am Neu but I might as well let him think I am Asuka. 

If that's what he wants to believe… well, I can use that. 

The way he defends me in front of those cronies of his, to the rest of that little gang of holier-than-thou murderers, is - interesting, to say the least. They, unfortunately, are not nearly so blinded as he. That would be too much to hope for. They, the other three, suspect something. Take that sallow redhead, for example. Red demanded to know where we, Schreient, have hidden his baby sister, the strange little girl who will help us to revive Masafumi-sama. And _he_, poor fool, leapt in to defend me almost instinctively, interposing himself between me and his angry crony. Of course poor little Asuka doesn't know where your beloved kid sister is. How sweet. So ridiculously sweet it's cavity-inducing. 

Then there are the other two. The reckless dark one is plainly suspicious. I hope he isn't trying to hide it. I hope he isn't fancying himself discreet when he's about as difficult to read as a child's primer. Those looks he gives me whenever he fancies I'm not looking and occasionally when I obviously am tell me he doesn't believe in my sincerity as plainly as if he'd shouted it out loud. The last one, that blue-eyed brat, hides it better - not that this is all that difficult when our brown-haired friend considers that if he doesn't tell me he doesn't trust me then I won't notice his misgivings. 

Perhaps we overestimated them, these bickering killers. Seen like this they're hardly terrifying. Hardly likely to strike me, or anyone for that matter, as such a threat… 

…and _he_, that stupid blonde bastard who wants me to be his dead girlfriend, wants to believe in my sincerity more than he does that of his so-called friends. Ha. What an absurd man. I thought their ties to one another were stronger than that but honestly, how close they can be if all it takes to have them turning on one another, doubting one another, is the presence of a woman? One single woman? What a joke! 

He believes in me--   
--but it's not me. He believes in Asuka. 

How _silly_ of me to think otherwise. And how _touching_. How disgustingly _touching_ that he's so willing to try and live in the past, to try and return to a time that no longer exists. He's so taken with his precious bloody dead Asuka that he'll try to evoke her in me, in the form of a woman who's tried to kill him over and over again, who he should know by now won't be satisfied until she has him lying dead at her feet. Because that is all I want from him. Not his love, not his protection, not his faith. His death. 

But he can't or won't believe that. He'll try to find Asuka in me, in Neu of Schreient, just like he tried to find her in Kyoko. Never mind that _Kyoko_ was no replacement. 

It almost makes me wish Kyoko had been more than another game. It was funny to watch him trying to spot Asuka in Kyoko. To witness his growing disillusionment with her, with me, and over the course of little more than an afternoon. Because he wanted me, her, to be Asuka. Stupid bastard. Kyoko was Neu. What makes him think that it will be any different this time round? Is he really that stupid? Is he really that smitten? All I can say is he'd better be. 

You'd think he'd have learnt from that experience, but no. That would be far too sensible for Lover Boy. He won't stop believing in Asuka until she, I, betrays him completely. Maybe he won't stop even then. But I will make him see Neu. I will make you realize that your precious Asuka is gone. Even if I was her, even if it mattered that I was her - my past is irrelevant; who cares what I was before I was of Schreient? That part of me isn't important - I am not her any more. Even if I was her once I could never be her again and I wouldn't _want_ to be. Not with him to go back to. 

How dare he think I would want to? I wouldn't discard Masafumi-sama for him. For _him_! 

And how much does Weiss love his Asuka? Enough to let her double kill him? I wonder. I wonder. I positively ache to find out. Will he die believing in her? If I beat him to death, break his worthless neck, strangle him with my bare hands… will he still believe in her? Will he still believe I am her regardless of the fact that, whoever Asuka may have been, I highly doubt the silly bitch wanted him dead? Well, we'll see. He believes in her and so he believes in me. He believes that I will not betray him because he cannot believe his precious Asuka would ever do such a thing. But I'm not Asuka, you bloody fool. 

I am Neu. I know who I am. And, Youji Kudou, it's high time you knew it too. 

- ende - 


End file.
